ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES
"A theologian needs to know the life and spirit of his own time. Theology has often been viewed with prejudice and distrust, because it was supposed to be a study of recluses or moral specialists, who lived apart from the life of their age, and whose conclusions needed correcting in the light of wider thought and larger experience. Such impressions are not wholly false, and in so far as they are correct, theology cannot complain if it is distrusted. It may seem as if a man might successfully study the themes of theology in the solitude of a recluse; but the thinking of recluses tends to abstraction, oversystematizing, and neglect of the practical aspects of truth. Theology is the science of religion, and religion is a life. Surely the science of the richest life is entitled to the benefit of health, vigor, and open air. In order to success in theology, a man should be sensitive to life, and able to think in sympathy with the living thought around him. He should be ready to attend to the practical side of his theme, and capable of strong, practical views. All the more should he be in touch with life because theology is not a stationary science. It has always changed with the changing life of successive generations, and can never cease to do so. Therefore a theologian must needs have heard the voice of his own generation, and be able to live in sympathy with the Christian life that must send its vigor into his science. Theology stagnates when it is cut off from present life and thinking and has its sources wholly in the past, and the theologian's mind is the channel through which the fresh stream must flow in." WILLIAM NEWTON CLARKE, D. D., Outline of Christian Theology, p. 57.
BUSHNELL published four treatises on theology: "Christian Nurture," "God in Christ" (which may be regarded as embracing "Christ in Theology"), "Nature and the Supernatural," and "The Vicarious Sacrifice," In addition there are three volumes of sermons and four of addresses and essays. The first volume of the latter, - "Work and Play," - from a purely literary point of view, is to be regarded as his best. Of the first essay, which gives the title, Dr. Bartol said years after its delivery: "For originality, simplicity, and splendor, either as spoken or on the written page, it has scarce, if ever, been surpassed in the land;" a strong word when it is remembered that the best utterances of the greatest men of the country have been made in the form of addresses on similar occasions. Still, the verdict will stand. It has much in common with two of Emerson's essays, that on "The Method of Nature" and the address before the Divinity School. Each writer carries his theme along the path of nature into the world of the spirit, but the tread of Bushnell is firmer and his world is less elusive. His essay is sub-
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stantially a plea for the poet's conception of life, in which work that is "activity for an end" becomes play that is "activity as an end." "One prepares the fund or resources of enjoyment, the other is enjoyment itself." This he regards as the true end and destiny of man. Taking the leading forms of human activity, which as work are "counterfeits of play," he lifts them into the world of the spirit, where "life is its own end and joy." There is little originality in the idea; it is the clearness and splendor of the treatment that give to the essay its significance. One does not pass by this essay as vague or over-fine, but rather is held to it by the very force of its concreteness. The conviction of the prophet blends with the insight of the poet. The play of his imagination becomes a message and a call, and one reads the closing sentences feeling that what is described may be actually realized.
"Therefore I can easily persuade myself, that, if the world were free, free, I mean, of themselves, brought up, all, out of work into the pure inspiration of truth and charity, new forms of personal and intellectual beauty would appear, and society itself reveal the Orphic movement. No more will it be imagined that poetry and rhythm are accidents or figments of the race, one side of all ingredient or ground in nature. But we shall know that poetry is the real and true state of man, the proper and last ideal of souls, the free beauty they long for, and the rhythmic flow of that universal play in which all life would live" (p. 5).
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"The Growth of Law," an address given before the Alumni of Yale College in 1843, has special interest as containing probably the first correct statement made in the country of the relation of the Mosaic law to slavery; namely, that of "per-missive statutes" which had no "permanent significance" and were "liable to be superseded" under the growth, or, as would now be said, the evolution of law. The point is of interest exegetically and politically. Slavery was a burning question at the time, and all opinions upon it ran to extremes. It was defended as a "divine institution" because it was recognized by the laws of Moses. This was not denied, and the abolitionists, who put their question above every other, felt themselves driven into a quasi or real infidelity. Bushnell's assertion that slavery was unquestionably a part of the Mosaic law, but was subject to elimination under the growth of moral sentiments, had at that time no place in public thought. The Northern pulpits were silent, and the Southern, having the better of the argument according to the exegesis which both accepted, kept them so. Twenty years later (1863), Professor Goldwin Smith published a pamphlet in which he took the same ground, but not until the sword was taking vengeance on false exegesis. Bushnell's address is remarkable in many ways. It anticipated Maine and other writers on human society in making it an evolution upon a moral basis and having a moral end. There was at the time little or no science to uphold him;
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there was as yet no theory of the world, nor of progress, except one resting on the will of God or on human effort. That he should have struck out one that science afterward elaborated from count-less data, and put under it the theological purpose which science has reluctantly accorded, is remarkable. Emerson also had a like vision, but his utterance of it was a sibylline leaf; Bushnell put his in the form of a treatise, which is still a teaching.
"The Founders Great in their Unconsciousness," an address before the New England Society of New York (1849), reveals how deeply he was bedded in Puritan thought, and how thoroughly he apprehended its secret. It is regarded as one of the best of many great addresses upon the Pilgrim Fathers: -
"Coming in simple duty, duty was their power, - a divine fate in them, whose thrusting on to greatness and triumphant good took away all questions from the feeble arbitrament of their will, and made them even impassible to their burdens. And they went on building their unknown future, the more resolutely because it was unknown. For, though unknown, it was present in its power, present, not as in their projects and wise theories, but as a latent heat, concealed in their principles, and works, and prayers, and secret love, to be given out and become palpable in the world's cooling, ages after" (p. 127).
The student of Bushnell will not pass by the essay on "Life, or the Lives." It is a beautiful
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excursion into the region of nature and its living forms, touched here and there by the semi-pantheism that lends a constant charm to his thought, and running over with hints and allusions that are elsewhere wrought into his theological work, especially in "Nature and the Supernatural." Nature, when properly studied, that is, in its lives as well as in its forms, "becomes a circle of joyous life."
"Things above sense, the reverend mysteries of God and religion, now throng about the man, firing his imagination and challenging a ready faith. Having passed within the rind of matter, and by its mechanical laws, and discovered there a more potent, multitudinous, self-active world of life, his higher affinities are wakened, drawing him away to the common Father, whose life is in him, as in them, and to those meditations of the future otherwise faint and dim in their evidence. Or if, perchance, he remembers that all these creatures die and are no more, a feeling is by this time generated, which can no more be chilled, of his own self asserting immortality. So that when the autumnal frosts have changed the world's green look, and the pale nations of the forest leaves hang withering, or fly their stems, loosened by the windy blasts, he will call them with the poet, 'pestilence stricken multitudes,' and the sympathy yielded to the drooping spirits of creation will only have softened his own, preparing that gentleness in him which belongs both to faith and to genius. But the courage of his immortality stays firm, for
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well he knows that when the green myrmidons of spring appear to gladden again the earth, it will he to him as the opening of the gate 'Beautiful' over all graves, and that, being now a life again among the lives of May, singing with them that sing, and rejoicing in the new-born joy of all, it will only be his impulse to say, what before he believed,- The resurrection and the life" (p. 312).
There is much in this essay that reminds one of Edwards, who, had he not been the first theologian of his age, might have become its greatest naturalist. He seems to be in entire accord with Bushnell, who makes "the whole universe of nature a perfect analogon of the whole universe of thought or spirit," when he says that "the Son of God created the world for this very end, to communicate Himself in an image of His own excellency," not absolutely, but "a sort of a shadow or glimpse of His excellencies to bodies which . . . are but the shadows of beings and not real be-ings."1
Many of these essays reveal Bushnell as a publicist of the first order. No man of his day handled those questions of state that involved the moral sense of the people with such breadth of view and such fidelity, both to the nation and to conscience, as are displayed in many a sermon and address from 1837 to the very end of his life. His attitude on the slavery question was almost unique,
1 See quotation in Alien's Life of Edwards, p. 355, a passage of remarkable beauty and significance.
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and on some points absolutely so, as we have seen, standing as lie did on nearly unoccupied ground between the party of compromise and that of abolition, true to the Union, but true also to anti-slavery, and pointing out the path for each. His conception of the nation was very like that of Dr. Mulford, "a divine organism," an idea to which his theology easily lent itself. Hence all the greatness and force of his professional thought, along with his Puritan instincts and immeasurable earnestness and massive common sense, went into discourses and addresses which, more than any other utterances of the day, interpreted and out-lined the providential history of the nation for a period of thirty years.
We cannot illustrate by quotation, and only name such papers as "The True Wealth and Weal of Nations," "The Growth of Law," "The Founders Great In their Unconsciousness," "Historical Estimate of Connecticut," "The Doctrine of Loyalty," "The Day of Roads," "City Plans," "Common Schools," "Popular Government by Divine Right," "Our Obligations to the Dead," "Barbarism the First Danger." The last-named paper has hardly been equaled in the country for effective results because of the impulse it gave to home missions and to the founding of Christian colleges in the West, - the two forces which beyond all others have prevented a lapse into barbarism. "The Oregon Question," written and published in London, maintained in the face of heated
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public opinion the American claims as to boundary, on grounds that came to be accepted. Along with these, and of the same general tenor, are the following sermons, published only as pamphlets; "A Discourse on the Slavery Question;" "American Politics;" "Politics under the Law of God;" Prosperity our Duty;" "The Northern Iron," a war sermon; "Society and Religion," preached in and for California; "A Sermon to the Business Men of Hartford," one of many that served to train up a set of men in that city who have greatly contributed to its prosperity; and "Reverses Needed," a sermon telling them how to endure financial disaster. Two of these papers "Historical Estimate of Connecticut," and "Our Obligations to the Dead," an oration in honor of the Alumni of Yale College who fell in the War of the Rebellion will always be remembered and quoted, one as a revelation of the commonwealth to itself in all that is worthiest in its history, and the other for its political wisdom, early gained, and its tribute to the dead whom it en-shrines in tender and noble eulogy, "sanctified by an enduring record." It is in striking accord with Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, both being keyed to the note of sacrifice rather than of heroism: -
"No, no, ye living! It is the ammunition spent that wins the battle, not the ammunition brought off from the field. These dead are the spent ammunition of the war, and theirs, above all, is the
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victory. Upon what, indeed, turned the question of the war, but on the dead that could be furnished; or, what is in no wise different, the life that could be contributed for that kind of expenditure? These grim heroes, therefore, dead and dumb, that have strewed so many fields with their bodies, these are the price and purchase money of our triumph. A great many of us were ready to live, but these offered themselves, in a sense, to die, and by their cost the victory is won."1
1 Mr. Henry Clay Trumbull, in his papers on Bushnell in the S. S. Times
(August 12, 1899), speaks of the occasion, as follows: -
"When, at the close of the war, Yale College, his alma mater,
honored her many soldier sons by a commemorative celebration, Dr. Bushnell was
invited to deliver the oration. It seemed to me that he was never grander than
on that occasion. The armies were not yet disbanded, but from many fields and
posts officers and men came to share in the impressive services of that day.
Starred names which the whole nation delighted to honor were there, and
officers of every grade in the army and the navy, together with the host of
common soldiers of uncommon worth, and dignitaries of church and state, besides
the ordinary college assembly, made up an inspiring audience.
"The Doctor was himself the central figure of the hour, not merely because of his position, but by his character and mental and moral power. He stood there like an inspired prophet of old to give his message and to bear his witness. He had, in one sense, been in more battles than any veteran before him. His face and figure showed scars that came of conflicts with intellectual and spiritual giants. And in his countenance was the clear light of assured triumph in faith. All present looked up to him with admiration and reverence. But the temptation to speak words of praise and honor to the heroes before him had no power to swerve him from his duty of pointing all to the recognition of 'Our Obligations to the Dead.' He uplifted himself, and he uplifted his hearers, as he pointed away from the noblest of the living to the nobler dead who had died for them.''
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"The Age of Homespun" will probably be longer remembered and oftener quoted than any other writing of Bushnell, because it is so true a picture of rural New England life in the early part of the century. The invitation to preach the sermon at the Centennial Celebration of Litchfield County (August 14,1851) came to him soon after the publication of "Christ in Theology," and he gladly turned away from the turmoil it awoke to the memories of "days of victorious health, sound digestion, peaceful sleep, and youthful spirits." The discourse is an outburst of grateful recollection of his early life, pathetic, humorous, photographic in its accuracy, keen in its analysis, reverent and noble in its tone, revealing not more the period it describes than the man himself. We quote but briefly: -
"There is no affectation of seriousness in the assembly, no mannerism of worship; some would say too little of the manner of worship. They think of nothing, in fact, save what meets their intelligence and enters into them by that method. They appear like men who have a digestion for strong meat, and have no conception that trifles more delicate can be of any account to feed the system. Nothing is dull that has the matter in it, nothing long that has not exhausted the matter. If the minister speaks in his greatcoat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their
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heads, they are none the less content, If only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard, and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity - give them anything high enough, and the tough, muscle of their inward man will be climbing sturdily into it; and if they go away having something to think of, they have had a good day. A perceptible glow will kindle in their hard faces, only when some one of the chief apostles, a Day, a Smith, or a Bellamy, has come to lead them up some higher pinnacle of thought, or pile upon their sturdy mind some heavier weight of argument fainting never under any weight, even that which, to the foreign critics of the discourses preached by them, and others of their day, it seems impossible for any, the most cultivated audience in the world, to have supported. These royal men of homespun how great a thing to them was religion!" (p. 895.)
The essays on "Pulpit Talent" and "Training for the Pulpit Man ward" are among the most useful of his writings. The first should be often read by preachers to reinstate them in the requisites of their profession, Bushnell was the ablest preacher of his clay, and the first essay is an unconscious revelation of himself. He discusses the usual "canonical talents," as he calls them, "high scholarship; a metaphysical and theological thinking talent; style or talent for expression; and
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a talent of manner and voice for speaking." Due acknowledgment is made of the value of these as "cultivatable talents," but he regards them with careful discrimination, having an eye on higher qualities.
"It is one of the sad things about book learning that it so easily becomes a limitation upon souls and a kind of dry rot in their vigor. The receptive faculty absorbs the generative, and the scholar hood sucks up the manhood. I know not how to put this matter of scholarship better than to say that it needs to be universal; to be out in God's universe; that is, to see and study and know everything, books and men and the whole work of God from the stars downward; to have a sharp observation of war and peace and trade; of animals and trees and atoms; of the weather, and the evanescent smells of the creations; to have bored into society in all its grades and meanings, its manners, passions, prejudices, and times; so that, as the study goes on, the soul will be getting full of laws, images, analogies, and facts, and drawing out all subtlest threads of import to be its interpreters when the preaching work requires. Of what use is it to know the German when we do not know the human? Or to know the Hebrew points when we do not know at all the points of our wonderfully punctuated humanity? A preacher wants a full storehouse of such learning, and then he wants the contents all shut in, so that they can never one of them get out, only as they
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leap out, unbidden, to help him and be a language for him. . . .
"There cannot be much preaching worthy of the name where there is no thinking. Preaching is nothing but the bursting out of light, which has first burst in or up from, where God is, among the soul's foundations. And to this end, great and heavy discipline is wanted, that the soul may be drilled into orderly right working. . . .
"An immense overdoing in the way of analysis often kills a sermon. Death itself is a great analyzer, and nothing ever comes out of the analyzing process fully alive. . . .
"True preaching struggles right away from formula, back into fact, and life, and the revelation of God and heaven. I make no objection to formulas; they are good enough in their place, and a certain instinct of our nature is comforted in having some articulations of results thought out to which our minds may refer. Formulas are the jerked meat of salvation, - if not always the strong meat, as many try to think, - dry and portable and good to keep, and when duly seethed and softened, and served with needful condiments, just possible to be eaten; but for the matter of living, we really want something fresher and more nutritious. On the whole, the kind of thinking talent wanted for a great preacher is that which piercingly loves; that which looks into things and through them, ploughing up pearls and ores, and now and then a diamond. It will not seem to go
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on metaphysically or scientifically, but with a certain round-about sense and vigor. And the people will be gathered to it because there is a gospel fire burning in it that warms them to a glow. This is power. . . .
"A great many preachers die of style, that is, of trying to soar; when, if they would only consent to go afoot as their ideas do, they might succeed and live. ...
"Only good and great matter makes a good and great style" (pp. 187-189).
He is doubtful as to the value of training in manner and voice. "It is mostly a natural talent, though it can be modulated and chastened by criticism." "I have never known a great college declaimer that became a great preacher." "The artistic air kills everything." "The greatest fault possible to a speaker is to be absolutely faultless."
Dismissing the canonical talents, he names others, which he considers as more essential. First, "the talent for growth." He describes those who have it, as follows: -
"Increment is their destiny. Their force makes force. What they gather seems to enlarge their very brain. . . . By and by it begins to be seen that they move. Somebody finally speaks of them. Their sentiments are growing bigger, their opinions are getting weight, ideas are breaking in and imaginations breaking out, and the internal style of their souls, thus lifted, lifts the style of their expression. They at length get the sense of position,
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and then a certain majesty of consciousness adds weight to their speech. And finally the wonderful thing about them is that they keep on growing, confounding all expectation, getting all the while more breadth and richness, and covering in their life, even to its close, with a certain evergreen fresh-ness that is admirable and beautiful to behold" (p. 194).
"Passing to the class of talents that are most preeminently preaching talents, I name first the talent of a great conscience or a firmly accentuated moral nature. . . . No great and high authority is possible in a movement on souls, without a great conscience. Principles analytically distinguished and reasoned by the understanding have a tame, weak accent as respects authority, but when they are issued from the conscience, rung as peals by the conscience, they get an attribute of thunder. Like thunder, too, they are asserted by their own mere utterance and the unquestionable authority of their voice" (p. 201).
The analysis of imperfect consciences is most keen and searching. "Some consciences seem to be wholly insignificant and weak till they are tempest-strung, or get mounted somehow on the back of passion. There is no human creature so thoroughly wicked and diabolical as he that is protesting in the heat of his will, or the fume of his grudges and resentments, how conscientious he is. Another kind of conscience appears to be felt mainly as an irritant. It pricks and nettles, but
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does not very much sway even the subject himself. It is sharp, pungent, thin, but never kingly. There is also a slimy, would-be tender, slow-moving conscience, that draws itself in vicious softness like a snail upon a limb, till, presto, the conscientious slime hardens into a shell, and what seemed an almost skinless sensibility becomes a horny casement of impracticability, obstinacy, or bigot stiffness. Now these and all such partial, crotchety, and misbegotten consciences are insufficient to make a powerful preacher. Their diameter is not big enough to carry any great projectile of conviction. No matter what, or how great, his promise on the score of his other gifts and acquirements, he cannot be impressive because there is no ring of authority in his moral nature" (p. 201).
"A large, immediate, and free beholding is necessary to make a powerful preacher." . . . "Faith has a way of proving premises themselves, namely, by seeing them. In virtue of the faith-talent, we have the possibility also of divine inspirations, and of all those exaltations - visibly divine movements in the soul that endow and are needed to endow the preacher" (p. 203).
"There is nothing more evident than that one may have all the four canonical talents in great promise, and yet have almost no faith talent with them, no inspiration, no capacity of any. The nature they have is either a nature too impetuous, or too close, to let any divine movements have play in it. The preacher must be a very different kind
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of man: one who can "be unified with God by his faith, and go into preaching not as a calling but a call; one who can do more than get up notions about God, and preach the notions; one who knows God as he knows his friend, and by closeness of insight gets a Christly meaning in his look, a divine quality in his voice, action visibly swayed by unknown impulse, imaginations that are apocalyptic, beauty of feeling not earthly, authority flavored by heavenly sanctity and sweetness, argument that breaks out in flame, asserting new premises and fertilizing old ones more by what is put into them than by what is deduced from them. Such a man can be God's prophet; that is to say, he can preach" (p. 205).
He rates as indispensable what he calls "a man's atmosphere" an undefinable quantity which may be hinted at as "the moral aroma of character;" or "magnetic sphere of the person;" or "the voice, color, feature, manner, and general soul-play represented in them."
There are good atmospheres that are yet "disqualifications in the preacher."
"One carries about with him, for example, the inevitable literary atmosphere, and a shower-bath on his audience could not more effectually kill the sermon. Another preaches out of a scientific atmosphere, which is scarcely better; another out of a philosophic, which is even worse, for no human soul is going either to be pierced for sin, or to re-pent of it, scientifically; and as little is any one
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going to believe, or hope, or walk with God, or be a little child, philosophically, No man ever becomes a really great preacher who has not the talent of a right and genuinely Christian atmosphere" (p. 209).
After naming the "administrative, organizing capacity," of which he says "it takes more high manhood, more wisdom, firmness, character, and right-seeing ability to administer well in the cause than it does to preach well," the essay closes with words of friendly advice, first warning the preacher against conceit as "the bane of faith;" yet "not to think so meanly of yourself that you cannot be yourself." "Remember also, as a law of the talents, that any one of them waked into power wakes the talent next to it, and that in Eke manner another, till finally the whole circle wakes into power." "What we want is not to go hunting our poor nature through, that we may find what is slumbering in us waiting to be somehow waked. But the grand first thing, or chief concern for us is to be simply Christed all through, filled in every faculty and member with his Christly manifestation, in that manner to be so interwoven with him as to cross fiber and feel throughout the quickening contact of his personality; and then everything in us, no matter what, will be made the most of, because the corresponding Christly talent will be playing divinely with it, and charging it with power from himself" (p. 219).
The second paper, "Training for the Pulpit
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Manward," is even more searching. It is through-out a steady protest against getting "stalled in abstract theology," and a plea, repeated in every page, that the preacher should "keep in the living world and make a part of it," a leading characteristic of Bushnell himself, both as a preacher and a theologian. We have room for but one quotation, which we introduce because, guided by the underlying thought of his subject, he treats sin in a first-hand way, which is not always the case elsewhere in his writings. We do not hesitate to class it among the most powerful utterances on the subject.
"I suggest again, as a matter closely related, the very large, really sublime interest we should get in persons, or souls, in distinction from subjects, by putting the mind down carefully on the study or due exploration of sin. I do not mean, by this any theologic exploration, such as we have reported in our systems, no questioning about the origin, or propagation, or totality, or disability, or immedicable guilt of sin, but a going into and through it as it is, and the strange wild work it makes in the intestine struggles and wars of the mind. For it is a fact, I fear, that we sometimes very nearly kill our natural interest in persons, by just bolting them down theologically into what we call death and there making an end. We clap an extinguisher on them, in this manner, and they drop out of interest, just where they become most interesting, where meaning, and size, and force, and
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depth of sorrow, and amount of life, and every-thing fit to engage our concern is most impressively revealed. Say no more of the dignity of human nature; here is something far beyond all that, a wild, strange flame raging inwardly in that nature, that, for combinations of great feeling, and war, and woe, is surpassed by no tragedy or epic, nor by all tragedies and epics together. Here in the soul's secret chambers are Faust’s more subtle than Faust, Hamlets more mysterious than Hamlet, Lears more distracted and desolate than Lear; wills that do what they allow not, and what they would not do; wars in the members; bodies of death to be carried, as in Paul; wild horses of the mind, governed by no rein, as in Plato; subtleties of cunning, plausibility’s of seeming virtues, memories writ in letters of fire, great thoughts heaving under the brimstone marl of revenges, pains of wrong and of sympathy with suffering wrong, aspirations that have lost courage, hates, loves, beautiful dreams, and tears; - all these acting at cross-purposes and representing, as it were to sight, the broken order of the mind. Getting into the secret working, and seeing how the drama goes on in so many mystic parts, the wondrous life-scene - shall we call it poetry? Takes on a look at once "brilliant and pitiful and appalling, and what we call the person becomes a world of boundless capacities shaken out of their law, energies in full conflict and without government, passions that are wild, sorrows that are weak. By such explorations,
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never to "be exhausted by discovery, our sense of person or mind or soul is widely opened and may always be kept fresh." (p. 232).
These quotations on preaching, so largely disproportionate to the size of our volume, are designedly made because they so clearly and aptly reveal Bushnell as a theologian, as a preacher, and as a man. It would be a great mistake to omit these two essays from the instruction of candidates for the ministry. The substance of them may be wrought into other men's work, but the piercing insight, the remorseless probing into motives, the massive common sense, the play of wit and wisdom, the balance of truth, the spiritual power, the absolute transcript of the inmost meaning of the gospel, all set in noblest forms and glowing with passion, nowhere else are these things to be found as in these addresses.
In the essay on "Religious Music" we find him, as everywhere else, testing his principle that the universe of nature is a perfect analogon of the universe of thought or spirit, Bushnell, as his biographer remarks, was "musically organized." It might be more closely said that he was rhythmically organized. The most marked quality in his style is its rhythm, - a feature now subordinated to the modern demand that every sentence shall have the edge and ring of steel. We insist on scientific accuracy, and leave out the music which is also a part of science; but when we have gone further into nature, we shall return to what is
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deepest in it, and suffer the rhythmic beat to come back into our sentences. Bushnell's style was as inevitable as his ear, and was the product of it. He both heard and thought rhythmically, and the thought led him into the inmost chamber of nature, where he discovered its profoundest secret. This sense was so strong that many passages, like the closing pages of "Life, and the Lives," and an-other that will be quoted at the end of this chapter, are distinctly poems both in sentiment and rhythmic swing. He himself recognized this quality: -
"This divine principle of music breaks into the style of every good writer, every powerful speaker, and beats in rhythmic life in his periods. Even if he is rough and fierce, as he may be and as true genius often is, it will yet be the roughness of an inspired movement; a wizard storm of sounds that rage in melody, not the dead jolting of cadences that have no inner life back of the wind force that utters them. The talent of music is the possibility, in fact, of rhythm, of inspiration, and of all poetic life" (p. 464).
Musicians are the least able of all artists to explain their art; they either lapse into sentimentality, or stop on technique, or, rightly enough, are content with feeling it. Bushnell in this essay, though he does not explain music, traces it to its source in nature, where he finds in all objects a capacity for sound that corresponds to our feelings as religious beings; "a wonderful fact that God has hidden powers of music in things without life;
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and that when they are used in right distinctions, or properties of sound, they discourse what we know, - what meets, interprets, and works our feeling, as living and spiritual creatures." From this starting-point he goes on to discuss the fact "that a grand, harmonic, soul-interpreting law of music pervades all the objects of the material creation, and that things without life, all metals and woods and valleys and mountains and waters, are tempered with distinctions of sound, and toned to be a language to the feeling of the heart."
The following passage is a memory of his experience on the Great Scheidegg above Grindelwald:
"If it seems incredible that the soul of music is in the heart of all created being, then the laws of harmony themselves shall answer, one string vibrating to another, when it is not struck itself, and tittering its voice of concord simply because the concord is in it and it feels the pulses on the air to which it cannot be silent. Nay, the solid mountains and their giant masses of rock shall answer; catching, as they will, the bray of horns, or the stunning blast of cannon, rolling it across from one top to another in reverberating pulses, till it falls into bars of musical rhythm, and chimes and cadences of silver melody. I have heard some fine music, as men are wont to speak, the play of orchestras, the anthems of choirs, the voices of song that moved admiring nations. But in the lofty passes of the Alps, I heard a music overhead from God's cloudy orchestra, the giant peaks of rock and
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ice, curtained in "by the driving mist and only dimly visible athwart the sky through its folds, such as mocks all sounds our lower worlds of art can ever hope to raise. I stood (excuse the simplicity) calling to them, in the loudest shouts I could raise, even till my power was spent, and listening in compulsory trance to their reply. I heard them roll it up through their cloudy worlds of snow, sifting out the harsh qualities that were tearing in it as demon screams of sin, holding on upon it as if it were a hymn they were fining to the ear of the great Creator, and sending it round and round in long reduplications of sweetness, minute after minute, till finally receding and rising, it trembled, as it were, among the quick congratulations of angels, and fell into the silence of the pure empyrean. I had never any conception before of what is meant by quality in sound. There was more power upon the soul in one of those simple notes than I ever expect to feel from any-thing called music below, or ever can feel till I hear them again in the choirs of the angelic world. I had never such a sense of purity, or of what a simple sound may tell of purity, by its own pure quality; and I could not but say, O my God, teach me this! Be this in me forever! And I can truly affirm that the experience of that hour has consciously made me better able to think of God ever since better able to worship. All other sounds are gone; the sounds of yesterday, heard in the silence of enchanted multitudes, are gone; but that is with me still, and I hope will never cease
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to ring in my spirit, till I go down to the slumber of silence itself" (p. 455).
In 1869, stirred by John Stuart Mill's recent advocacy of woman's suffrage, and by the general agitation of the subject, he prepared a small volume, which he named with his usual skill, "The Reform against Nature." Its aim is perhaps best indicated by a homely illustration (p. 101): "If the log may be split by the wooden wedge, most of us would like to be sure that the wedge is not going to be split by the log."
The dedication is so neat and characteristic a bit of writing that it must be quoted: -
"For once I will dare to break open one of the customary seals of silence, by inscribing this little book to the woman I know best and most thoroughly; having been overlapped, as it were, and curtained in the same consciousness for the last thirty-six years. If she is offended that I do it without her consent, I hope she may get over the offense shortly, as she has a great many others that were worse. She has been with me in many weaknesses and some storms, giving strength alike in both; sharp enough to see my faults, faithful enough to expose them, and considerate enough to do it wisely: shrinking never from loss, or blame, or shame to be encountered in anything right to be done; adding great and high, instigations, instigations always to good, and never to evil mistaken for good; forecasting always tilings bravest and best to be done, and supplying inspirations enough
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to have made a hero, if they had not lacked the timber. If I have done anything well, she has been the more really in it that she did not know it, and the more willingly also that having her part in it known has not occurred to her; compelling me thus to honor not less, but more, the covert glory of the womanly nature; even as I obtain a distinct and more wondering apprehension of the divine meanings, and moistenings, and countless, unsought ministries it contributes to this otherwise very dry world."
"Moral Uses of Dark Things" is a book of substantially the same character as "Nature and the Supernatural," having the same purpose to bring the "dark things" of the universe and of human experience into "the one system of God." The title itself challenged him to the keenest use of his faculties. It was a passion with him to solve problems. Like Edwards, he did not hesitate to discuss "God's final ends in creation" when his theme led him in that direction. He liked to play with questions, to toss them in the air and see in what shape they would come back to him. This book affords an opportunity to correct a general impression that Bushnell was not a wide reader, and even avoided books. The impression grows out of the fact that he seldom quotes, and also from the undeniable fact that he was not a wide and thorough reader in what is termed theology. But before deciding whether that was a professional crime in him, it would be
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well to find out what were the professional limits for such, a theologian as Bushnell. It is true that he did not read books of systematic theology, nor did he care much for those of the Bridgewater Treatise stamp; and for metaphysics he cared nothing; but he read history freely, and in the great masters of literature, "the literature of power," as De Quincey called it, from Plato and Shakespeare down, he was a careful and constant reader. Such reading, indeed, did not fit him to enter as an equal into the theological arena of his day, where the weapons were chosen from, another arsenal, and the conflicts were over definition and precedent; but the time was near at hand when theology, as Dr. Arnold was already urging, must draw from all fields of study and thought, and must find its questions debated in the literature of humanity rather than in bodies of divinity. Their Bushnell went as by instinct, and was at home. That he was unread in technical theology in no way hindered him from doing the thing that needed to be done. The interpretations of Christianity that the world is now receiving do not come in that channel, but from adjacent or original sources, - from poets and essayists and naturalists and practical workers in fields of Christian activity. The books that are influencing theology today come from such sources, and the question whether the authors are familiar with technical theology is relatively unimportant. The writer does not deride theology past or present, it will always be the queen of
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the sciences, - but only seeks to make it clear that it is a matter of trifling significance that Bushnell was not a wide reader of it. He was a forerunner of a class of students and thinkers who are molding if not recreating theology without being technical theologians.
The topics in this book wear an audacious cast; some have been debated from the beginning and are still without answer; others are undergoing the scrutiny of science; and others still are speedily lost in the mystery of being. Most of them are inroads into psychology, then even more than now a rudimentary science. The fault, if there be any, in his treatment is overemphasis of his main contention. He starts with a determination to find a moral use in whatever falls under his eye, and so names some things as moral that are simply economic or incidental, and moral only as contributing to a final moral use. The end of all things may be moral, but to regard everything that leads up to it as moral is to set aside distinctions that are essential to exact thought, and to force all things into one category. Bushnell is correct in denying the assumption "that physical uses are the decisive tests or objects of all the contrivance to be looked for in God's works," and in contending that "they are resolvable only by their moral uses;" but it is a mistake to regard the physical and the moral as antithetic. It is at this point that he lets in certain theological conceptions that relate to evil and its effect on nature which no longer have foot-
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ing in the world of thought; moral evil has nothing to do with nature; even analogy fails to connect them. But the chief defect in these papers is an inevitable one, growing out of the imperfect science of the day. Bushnell was a scientific thinker, but there was at the time no theory of nature as a whole that was scientific. Some of his topics, however, were cosmic in their breadth, and his treatment of them could not always be synthetic. He wrote before evolution had been baptized into the household of faith, and hence was without the guidance of that general law under which he could have ranged his facts in scientific and harmonious order. But while ignorant of evolution, he was all the while using it in unconscious ways simply because his thought ran so close to it at many points. Still, what he lacked, less, indeed, than any theological writer of his day, was a unifying principle in his use of scientific facts. In its place he put analogy, a hint, but not a law. Hence some of the essays are a mixture of truth and mistake, as those on Pain, and Physical Danger. But it is easy to pass over the mistake, and dwell on the truth, which often is most fresh and suggestive. The book is fascinating beyond almost any other from his pen by reason of its intellectual glow and vigor. Evidently the papers came from him when he was at his best. In no other of his works is there such wealth of epigram and such flash of genius. Often a treatise is compressed into a sentence, as when he says that "the faith of immor-
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tality depends on a sense of it begotten, not on an argument for it concluded." He calls "sleep a spiritualizer in the constitution of nature itself," and pain "a kind of general sacrament for the world." "God is always letting things come into the world that He will not let stay in it." "While God is doing facts, we are thinking dangers." "Immortality is nothing but the fact translated of immutable morality." The chapter from which this quotation is taken "Of the Mutabilities of Life" not only redeems a hackneyed theme from the commonplace, but is an original discussion of immortality, and fit to become a classic on the subject. Indeed, the whole book is full of profound suggestion and subjects that are inevitably treated in the pulpit, and the young preacher cannot do better than first to saturate his mind with them, and then borrow as liberally as honesty will allow. We take the liberty to commend especially Bushnell's description of a wise man in the paper on "Insanity" (p. 269), the ablest, perhaps, in the series, a masterly summation of requisites that re-minds one of John Henry Newman's description of a gentleman in his "Idea of a University" (p. 208), and of the uses of education (p. 178), two pages of English literature hard to be matched in discriminating analysis and beauty of diction.
"A wise man is one who understands himself well enough to make due allowance for such un-sane moods and varieties, never concluding that a thing is thus or thus, because just now it bears
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that look; waiting often to see what a sleep, or a walk, or a cool revision, or perhaps a considerable turn of repentance will do. He does not slash upon a subject or a man from the point of a just now rising temper. He maintains a noble candor, by waiting sometimes for a gentler spirit and a better sense of truth. He is never intolerant of other men's judgments, because he is a little distrustful of his own. He restrains the dislikes of prejudice, because he has a prejudice against his dislikes. His resentments are softened by his condemnations of himself. His depressions do not crush him, because he has sometimes seen the sun, and believes it may appear again. He revises his opinions readily, because he has a right, he thinks, to better opinions, if he can find them. He holds fast sound opinions, lest his moodiness in change should take all truth away. And if his unsane thinking appears to be toppling him down the gulfs of skepticism, he recovers himself by just raising the question whether a more sane way of thinking might not think differently. A man who is duly aware thus of his own distempered faculty makes a life how different from one who acts as if he were infallible, and had nothing to do but just to let himself be pronounced! There is, in fact, no possibility of conducting a life successfully on in that manner. If there be any truth that vitally concerns the morally right self-keeping and beauty of character, it is that which allows and makes room for the distempers of a practically insane
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state; one that puts action by the side of correction, and keeps it in wisdom by keeping it in regulative company" (p. 269).
We take leave of these delightful papers, that "tear the disguise of a curse from many a blessing," with a quotation from that on Winter, half sermon and half idyll, full of apothegm and poetry, common sense and fancy, the logic halting at times but still holding on to its conclusion, a paper to be read with Whittier's "Snowbound," and closing with an exquisite touch, perhaps a personal forecast mingling with the words: -
"Now is the time to meditate all our most serious concerns of life anew. If the main question is still unsettled or unattended to, there is no other so good time for a duty that requires so much of concentration. If we have grown slack in our principles, now is the time to set them up and be ourselves set up in their company. If the fascinations of time have stolen us away from the invisible good, now is the time to set our gaze more steadfastly on it, when the good that is visible is frosted, and hid under snows from the sight. Now is the time to be rational and strong, to revise our mistakes, shake off our self-indulgences, prepare our charities, justify our friendships, shed a sacred influence over our families, set ourselves to the service of our country and our God, by whatever cost of sacrifice. Doing this, as we may, it will not much concern us, I think, if our flight should also be in the winter" (p. 209).